let’s hang out

When even a little of your life’s work or heart’s desire gets clearer, you suddenly want to move toward it fast, right? The thing you’ve been wanting to feel, the electricity, the flow, the zzZZZZZZZzzzzzz, you finally feel it, and if you’re anything like me, you want to move toward it at top speed. And then, something pops up in the road that slows you down; it grinds you to a halt, and forces you to be still, to wait, to do nothing.

For me, that thing is bronchitis. I know, it doesn’t sound so bad if you’ve had it or you know what it is, but just because it has a common name doesn’t mean it won’t take you out like a first-string middle linebacker.

This might make a better story if I told you that I’d been working myself to the bone, that I’d been spending shift after shift in the hospital praying with families who were losing loved ones, that I’d baptized five babies and laid to rest five more, that I’d presented three verbatims, and that I’d provided staff care for nursing staff on six different units, all in the span of a week! (And really, if you’re not a hospital chaplain, by now you’re rolling your eyes.) But none of that is true. My first week of work in May was pretty average: I did help facilitate some staff care on a couple of ICUs, and I co-facilitated a community health center spirituality group in which no one showed up. By the end of the week, though, I could feel that telltale sweat/chills/ache that said something bad was coming, and I spent most of the weekend in bed. I missed three days of work this past week to this infection. I came in on a Tuesday when I should have stayed home, and I came in on a Wednesday because I didn’t want to miss more education. My colleagues and supervisors all wore an expression of concern and incredulity when we talked: they looked at me like, woman, what are you doing here? You sound terrible and you look worse. It’s not that deep, go home.

I’m often a worker who believes in boundaries. My phone doesn’t ring after 9 pm because that’s how I set it up, and that’s how I like it. If I can at all help it, I do all my CPE writing at work, so that when I’m home, I can enjoy being there, and spend my time the way I choose to. When my colleagues are in need of time to tend to their lives—they’re sick, or injured, or a loved one has died—I’m big into them placing their attention where it belongs and picking up their slack. But somehow, when I was sick, I couldn’t show up this way for myself. I was stunned, honestly. I was embarrassed. It took several folks worrying over me to help me understand that this wasn’t something I could power through. What was at work in me that made me keep trying to pretend I wasn’t as bad off as I was? When I finally got home and was still, the rip tide of illness took me. My throat was on fire. My chest and belly were ceaselessly heaving and sore with coughs that buckled my entire body. My skin was clammy and greasy. My voice was hoarse, if it was there at all. I got tired getting up to change my pjs or just make tea. It was bad. Few times in life have I slept so much and still felt so tired.

I went to urgent care, and while I was there, I flashed back to the last time I was a child and was this sick. As a girl, I was desperately afraid of the throat culture: a nurse, armed with a Q-tip the length of a pencil and the circumference of a marble stuck a wooden popsicle on your tongue and went on the hunt for your tonsils. She would wipe over and over and over with her swab, and it was all I could do not to puke all over her shoes. I sat there and saw that nurse come in with the swab, and I was instantly ten years old, and started apologizing for whatever would come next. The, nurse, bless her heart, believed me when I told her I’d try not to boot, and she wheeled the laptop out of the room and out of the splash zone. Fortunately, the process has changed over the last 30 years. No more tongue depressors, and the touch is evidently a lot less precise. I managed to do a strep test and a throat culture without redecorating her scrubs, myself, or the room.

Parts of me have asked, in the haze of fever dreams, when did I get sick? How was I exposed? What caused this to happen: did my acupuncture loose something? Is this a healing crisis? I did a lot of energy work, do I need a cleansing? But I’m not sure how much any of the answers to these questions matter; what feels important is the stillness I must practice in getting well.

Stillness is not my favorite. I am a big woman with a big personality and a big reservoir of energy. So being still feels like I don’t care. It’s also worth saying, and it only occurs to me now, that there have been moments in my life when other people, white people or older people, people with more power than me, have perceived my stillness as a kind of flaw, some indicator that I don’t want it bad enough or I’m not serious, that in order to prove my worth and my capacity I must always be doing. Now, I’m able to look back and feel compassion for that poor younger version of myself who was always trying to prove, and to tell those folks who felt I didn’t jump fast enough to go kick rocks. But is that anxiety of proving myself still at work?

A friend and colleague in my cohort helped me surface an idea that I hold: if I’m not hustling or working or doing something, then I am sure (read, afraid) that something bad is going to happen. If I take my hands off the wheel, if I don’t work, if I am still and surrendered, Spirit is not going to bless me, but instead only ruin and desolation are mine. Can you imagine? What room is there for grace in this as a worldview? It sounds so Protestant and hard working: God helps those who help themselves, so get out there and do it, because you only get a blessing by earning it. Another colleague and friend reminded me of a member of the Major Arcana in the Tarot, a tool of reflection, insight, and/or divination: The Hanged Man.

The Hanged Man from Black Tarot by Nyasha Williams and Kimishka Naidoo.

This is my favorite rendering of the Hanged Man that I’ve seen so far. According to the Rider-Waite-Smith version, the card reflects a masculine-presenting person, caught by the leg in some kind of noose or trap, hanging upside down from something, and looks pretty chill about it. This is not a domestic terror act-cum-neighborhood picnic, and it’s not state-sanctioned murder; this is just a somebody who’s gotten scooped up, who can’t get untangled, and who’s just gonna relax and wait a while. This hanged man is female-presenting, has gorgeous locs (#hairgoals), and seems expressive in her suspension: she’s taking this time and making it creative, because what else would you do when suspended by silks, except see what kinds of cool shapes you can make with your body?

So I finally, finally feel like I’m in my zone, and I start to move forward, and I get grounded by a bronchial infection that makes me too tired to do much of anything. For days. I am forced, not just into energetic stillness, but into bodily stillness. I haven’t been back to work yet, so we’ll see what happens on Monday. But it would seem that there’s a new era, a new level, of stillness I need to practice. What will happen if I’m still? What will I miss out on? Will ruin and desolation come for me the way I fear they will? (I mean, eventually, because that’s part of the human experience right, but not like, tomorrow.) I don’t know what lessons stillness has to offer me. But I’m getting the signal loud and clear that it’s time to stop moving and just practice being still.

reluctant hope

This past Sunday I heard a pastor preach about Hope: because of the story of this day, we can have hope, she said to me. It reminded me that in previous Lenten and Easter seasons, I’m not the one who’s blasting trumpets and waving lilies and shouting for joy about resurrection; I’m quiet and anxious and awash in the mystery of my teacher not being where I left him. His body was right there. It sounds prosaic, like I’ve misplaced my keys or something, but the dissonance of him not being where he was when I saw them close the stone on him is so profound I feel it in my chest. He was just. Right. There. Now he’s gone.

There is a part of me that wonders if it’s a dirty little secret to acknowledge that I am a student of Christ who lacks hope, or at the very least, who doesn’t practice hope like it delivers and overcomes. On days when I feel bleak, when I am discouraged and enraged by the lack of love, the lack of morals, the lack of respect, that my fellow citizens feel for me, and for others with less power than I have, hope feels like an invitation to cruelty. I am supposed to have hope in a system that shows itself to be unbalanced, unfair, and unjust; I am supposed to hope that people with power chosen to represent my views and needs will act according to our shared conscience and shared beliefs; I am supposed to hope that the justice system will protect the ones I love. It feels mean to ask me to hope right now. Hope feels like a luxury for someone at less risk or with more privilege.

I won’t sing a song of victory over death for Easter; that’s a song that I’ve heard plenty of times before, and if I’m honest, it’s not as compelling, nor as challenging, as the songs I hear Christ sing about what it means to follow the Good Road in relationship with one another. Rather than hoping that my sin has been washed away, I hope that I can find or co-create a way to provide client-centered, compassionate, interfaith care for reproducing people as they grapple with the way their faith intersects their family planning choices. I hope that I am given the opportunity to bravely, tenderly chaplain folx while and after they are terminating a pregnancy for whatever reason they choose. I hope that I am brave enough to choose a life with more love today, and tomorrow, and the next day, even (or especially) if it flies in the face of chronos/capitalism/white supremacy/cis-heteronormativity. I hope that even if the path set before me is washed out that I can continue to traverse that which allows me to love others and to love myself. I hope deeply and desperately that the radical love of Creator Sets Free is even now loosing and dissolving chains that are being forged to oppress, deny, and destroy.

When I get confused or sad or scared, one of the saints I turn to is Julian of Norwich. I don’t yet know what she has to say about hope, but I know what she has to say about suffering. (Also, when I read her in old English, I read her out loud and let my tongue get kind of soft, and it’s the closest thing I can get to an imitation of Nicole Kidman. I smell a biopic.)

“… For I telle thee, howsowever thou do, thou shalle have wo. And therefore I wille that thou wisely know thy penance, which thou arte in continually, and that thou mekely take it for they penance. And than shalt thou truly se that alle this living is penance profitable.” This place is prison, this life is penance, and in the remedy he wille that we enjoy. The remedy is that oure lorde is with us, keping us and leding us into fulhed of joy.”

Did you get all that? Or, as the Penguin Classics put it:

“…for I tell you that you will suffer woe whatever you do. And therefore I want you to recognize clearly what your penance is, and then you will truly see that your whole life is a profitable penance.” This place is a prison and this life is a penance and he wants us to find joy in the remedy. The remedy is that our Lord is with us, protecting us and leading us into the fullness of joy; …”

Before I stroll away from the liberation I find so beautiful in Christ’s teachings into apologetics for Christianity as a tool of the enslavement and imperial projects, let me say I’m not positing—nor do I think Julian is positing—that we under the thumb of modern American Fascist Christian Nationalism must endure the suffering of the institution because we are the ones with less power, and to suffer makes us close to God. No. No no no no. I hear Audre Lorde whisper beside her, “I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself… the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak… I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective.” If suffering is a part of life, if it is a part of the human experience, then perhaps my hope is that God is with me, protecting me as I center love and beauty and mystery and pleasure even as I work at threshold spaces and on behalf of folks who need or want abortion. My hope is that the God who affirms the right of every person to choose their reproductive present and future also affirms in me the capacity to choose wisely. My hope is that the created plane that I delight in so fully becomes less and less of a distraction from the Oneness beyond all Separation, and that I will learn to love those who would squash me with their vision of fascist, white supremacist, Christian nationalism. I also hope that they will learn to love me, because they have much to learn about love, because they see me as human, and would seek to love me as they love themselves, which is, after all, what white jesus told them to do.

I was sitting down to write, and before Julian, before Audre Lorde, I heard the words of Emily Dickinson, like a chorus: hope is the thing with feathers, the thing with feathers, with feathers, but I didn’t know more than that. The Poetry Foundation races to my rescue

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

A photo of pale feathers of a bird wing. Photo by Pascal Bullan.

Sings and never stops. So even on my bleakest days, which can feel more frequent in our world, the thing with feathers inside me is still singing Hope, because that’s what it’s designed to do. Even on that Sunday morning, when the students of Jesus were exhausted and still traumatized, when the women were gathering their jars and pots, the birds sang: the song came in through their windows and outside their doorways, just like it did in my place this morning. The things with feathers sang, because that’s what they’ve been designed to do.

let’s journey together

An announcement and an invitation, my friends: I’ve been enrolled in a spiritual accompaniment training hosted and facilitated by Still Harbor, and I’ve reached the point in my training where I’m preparing to begin my practicum! This means I’m seeking a few people (2-3) who are available to work with me once a month starting in March to explore and be supported in their spiritual practice.

Though the term spiritual direction has its roots in a specific tradition, the close relationship built over time between two people with spiritual practice as its foundation transcends labels or religious history. I’ve been working with a spiritual director for more than a year, and I’ve found it to be invaluable in my self-care, spiritual, and political practices and spaces. The language from Still Harbor that describes spiritual direction is

“The process of contemplative listening carried out in the context of a one-to-one trusting and confidential relationship. A trained spiritual director journeys with another person by listening to that person’s life story and experiences with an ear for the movement of the spirit, the presence of the sacred, and/or the insights that come from making deep meaningful connections. By offering supportive responses as appropriate and encouraging deepening reflection, clients can open up to new understandings and paths of growth.
”

— Still Harbor

I have loved training and practicing this work with my colleagues, and it intersects beautifully with my spiritual care work within the health care community. I am so excited about continuing to move deeper into this work, and I’m looking for folks who are interested in working with a spiritual director, or who are interested in supporting my training and education in this work. I’m prioritizing my availability for BIPoC folx, for women & femmes, for queer folx, and for folx who are making plans and decisions around their reproductive health, and considering how their religious and/or spiritual life supports them, or complicates this. Having said that, I’m open to new clients outside these communities as well. In order to work together, I ask that we both make a three-month commitment, and that we begin in March. These three sessions are free. Please note, given my schedule I’m only looking for three clients, so if you’re interested, let me know soon, so that I can save space for you.

This work has been nourishing and meaningful for me, and I hope that it can be the same for you. As you reflect on and heal from your past, welcome and tend to your present, and discern and daydream your future, take some support.

A note about our relationship: if we are close, if we’re friends or family, it’s likely that our relationship outside this context would mean we shouldn’t work together; I would love to suggest a colleague who would be interested and available to work with you, though! If we haven’t spoken voice to voice, if we don’t have a relationship outside this space or social media, and you’d like to learn more, contact me! Rather than leaving a comment here, please contact me here.

photo by Brandon Atkinson

under construction

Reader, I’ve dispensed with the self-flagellation of not writing enough. If you want to whip me with a wet noodle, go for it. I’m letting myself off the hook today. xo

I’m currently working as a chaplain resident—someday I will rail about the racket that is chaplaincy training here and now, but not today—in a hospital in the American South. It takes great pride in the complexity of care it’s able to provide, and its legacy of patient diversity. When most people hear chaplain, they think a shifty, shady preacher who is coming to tell them how to believe, who will pray with them, and then split. I’d wager that most of the patients and staff that I spend time with don’t really get what my colleagues and I do. I spend my days walking the halls of the hospital, visiting with staff, with patients, with family, listening & talking with people who are not having the greatest time of their life, by and large, and being with them wherever they are. Some days we pray together. Some days I facilitate a ritual with them that makes them feel closer to the Divine, a closeness they can never be apart from, an outward symbol of an inward state of being. Some days I let them yell at me (mercifully few, because I feel ambivalent about this as quality care). Some days I let them tell me what they believe and how they’re making sense of what’s happening to them. Many days I sit with the dead and the dying, and their loved ones, listening, grieving, accompanying. Most days, I try to get folx to tell me that they are not fine, and what’s really on their heart, what are they going through.

You know what I don’t do? I don’t teach asana. I haven’t set foot in a studio as a teacher since I left Chicago in 2019. I rarely facilitate pranayama. The nature of my teaching has changed, or rather, the context has changed. I might teach nadi shodana to a pregnant person who has been in the hospital for weeks trying to stay pregnant, who is feeling overwhelmed by anxiety. I might breathe consciously while I am hugging someone (masked, of course) to allow their own breath to slow down and feel more present to them. I feel confused by this new context, and how I bring some of my pillars of practice and teaching into it.

This work is very different from my work as a yoga teacher, though the skills come in handy. It’s also really different from the work I recently did in div school, though there are also many lines that connect straight from one to the other. My current position has an expiration date, and I find myself asking a ton of questions, chief among them, how do I craft a career that explores these intersections that are so vital and meaningful to me?

One recent night, I was in the trauma room when a young man was brought in for care. My role in a situation like this is to stay out of the way of docs & techs & nurses, to provide a stable and grounding presence for everyone there, and when the time is right, to connect with a client/patient and offer to contact a community member who can show up for them. That is sometimes not possible, and was not possible on this night. He was not the worst-off client I’d ever seen, but his condition had a visceral effect on me. This morning, I was rereading some Simone Weil and I found,

“Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. ”

— "Waiting for God", Simone Weil

I instantly realized I had not had this capacity for this young man. I felt this when he was in the room, too. I reminded myself that grounding and stability cannot come from fear, that he was afraid, that the care providers, for all of their skill and knowledge, were amped up as well, and that he needed someone, someone, who could offer an energy that was stable and present. From across the room where I was standing, I planted my feet, softened my belly, lengthened my spine, and I took three deep breaths. I did not look away. I let him know that I was here, and that he wasn’t alone. He never looked at me. I did not get a chance to speak to him. So the outcome questions that you have, I have too. But I was there. When it was time for me to go, I made sure that my teammate had all the necessary info, and could show up as fully as I’d been able to.

Our world is full of folks who do not want to feel what we are going through, who don’t understand what feelings are and how to be with them, and so we turn to behaviors and choices that allow us not to feel them, whether those are visited on our own body, or on the bodies of others. These outcomes are often harmful, which is putting it mildly. My hope, and my desire, is that if we learn how to ask ourselves, what am I going through? and not to run from the tender, honest answer to that question, that practice will teach us the skills to be present with others and to ask them the same question. May those practices that allow us presence and stability show up for us in all the places and all the ways. May we find the place where the teachings and the paths converge, and allow it to lead us where we must go.

it was a good day.

The best moment of my life so far is the day I vowed to live life with my Favorite, the anniversary of which is incidentally, this coming Monday.

The second best was the day that we went, with my brother- and sister-in-law, to see The Best Damn Band in the Land, and I got to see the drum major and sousaphone player dot the I in OHIO in person at the Rose Bowl. (keep your eye on the front point of the script Ohio and you’ll see it. It still gives me goosebumps and makes me scream in delight.)

But I think yesterday that moment was beat out by this one, the day I got to stand up in front of my colleagues and friends and fellow graduates, some of the brightest, most insightful, intuitive, brilliant kind, generous, challenging, and inspiring people I have ever known, and tell them how grateful I am for them and how much they matter.

Thank you, friends. Your mark in my life is indelible. This moment will continue to shine in my heart for a long, long time.

jessica young chang, MDiv ‘22

This love makes me better every day.